Bare Bones by Bobby Bones Page B

in that slot.
    â€œI want to do mornings,” I said.
    â€œLet me have a couple days to think about it,” Dusty said.
    Now, I was twenty-two at the time. They should have never given me this job. I was way too young and too dumb. But on Monday, Dusty called me into his office and offered me the morning show for fifty thousand dollars a year.
    Not only was I the youngest morning show host of any of the top-fifty rated markets in the country, but I was now rich. Fifty thousand dollars was more money than I had ever imagined I’d be making in my life, and I hadn’t even been out of college for three months. With rent worries a thing of the past, I immediately moved out of the apartment I was sharing with a roommate who would leave me little notes like “You owe me seven cents for the slice of bread you took.” I’m not kidding. And I would literally find the seven cents that I owed her and put it on the counter. I even referred to her as “the Devil” on the air, which didn’t help our living situation much.
    In order to put the Devil in context, here is a quick list of the roommates I’ve had in my life, in descending rank:
    Evan: My best friend from high school, with whom I shared a college dorm room for about a second. One day I came back from work, and he had just moved out. Was gone. WTF? It was embarrassing to have someone just jump ship like that. Looking back, however, I was pretty difficult to live with. I had terrible hours in college; I woke up early and went to bed really, really late. And I didn’t party. There was no partying in the room. When I was there, I needed rest. Still, it was pretty crappy to have my best friend bail like that.
    Josh: I lived with Josh twice. Once after Evan moved out when he was assigned to me. And then in Little Rock with his wife. Good dude. Quiet. Quirky. I remember when he moved into my dorm room. I wasn’t there, but all of his stuff was, so I went through his closet. It was all slacks and T-shirts. I thought, This guy might just be nerdier than I am. And luckily, he was! We were perfect roomies.
    Matt: Another Henderson State undergrad, he was trying to do radio just like me. After I got him a job at KLAZ, he went by the name Scott Shady. I think he thought he was Eminem’s little half cousin. He was my sidekick for a few years, and we would drive back from work every night and prank-call The John and Jeff Show, based out of L.A. We also played a lot of Ken Griffey Jr. baseball on my PlayStation.
    Courtney: My best friend. TV sharing. Nap sharing. Life sharing. Brother and soul mate. But I was always really jealous of the number of girls he could get. He was as charming as he was good looking. So it seemed like a revolving door of “girls Bobby could never get.” That’s the only reason he isn’t number one.
    Jennifer: One of the best humans I have ever met. She was clean and paid rent on time, and her mom knew we were both broke so she bought us groceries once a month. It was the greatest living arrangement ever. When I was sick, she took care of me. When I was hungry, her mom fed me. When the house smelled like a dude, she made sure it didn’t. Shout-out to female roommates everywhere. And because of Jennifer, to this day, I still use a loofah.
    Oh yeah, back to the start of my radio career . . .
    Less than a year after I graduated from college, The Bobby Bones Show was born. For a while it was four hours of music, punctuated by a few announcements from me. It was basically the night show, only I had to wake up earlier. The reason I wanted a morning show, however, was because I wanted to talk more. As I grew more confident I tried to alter the ratio to less music and more talk, but I got pushback from Dusty and Jay. “Music gets ratings; you don’t,” they said. “Music’s proven; you’re not.”
    They were right. But I continued to push for more time making jokes,